Article contributed by Marcus Robertson, CTO, TrueAbility

As companies continue to move their enterprises to the cloud and the demand for qualified IT professionals grows, thousands of new technology positions are left unfilled every month. Our company processes a substantial amount of real-world technical assessments that are used to fill these open positions, which gives us a unique perspective into technical hiring trends in the industry.

Employers are working hard to attract talent with expertise in five key areas: cloud technologies, application development, front-end Development, big data management, and devops engineering.

Why These Skills?

Due to the cost benefits, scalability, and increased speed of deployment, companies ranging from startups to enterprises are increasing their reliance on cloud resources. They need to leverage technologies and methodologies that allow them to move quickly from concept to working application, with a renewed focus on user experience.

Additionally, companies know that data is king, and managing large amounts of data has become the nucleus for business operations, better decisions, and differentiation. This, along with more companies choosing to handle development and engineering in house, are the main reasons why these five areas are an emerging hotbed of IT jobs.

Tech companies are looking for candidates with proven experience in the following five categories and associated skill sets:

1. Cloud Technologies: AWS, Azure, Rackspace, and OpenStack
2. Application Development: Ruby, Java, C#
3. Front End Development: HTML5, CSS, Javascript
4. Big Data Management: Hadoop, MongoDB, Cassandra
5. Linux/DevOps Engineering: Linux Administration, Puppet/Chef, Scripting

If you don’t already have knowledge in these areas, one way to get these skills is by leveraging many of the online resources and trying out your new skills in a real environment.

To find out more about technology career hiring trends, visit the LISA '13 exhibit hall and stop by the TrueAbility booth.